The life span of a power supply, or mean time between failures (MTBF) is estimated at roughly 100,000 hours. Power supplies for servers, industrial control equipment, or other equipment where reliability is important may be hot swappable and may incorporate redundancy to allow for a faulty power supply to be replaced without downtime.
When providing redundancy, two or more power supplies are connected into a connecting board that allows the devices to speak to each other. Each power supply is usually housed in its own housing unit and has a single input and a single output. While this setup is suitable for redundancy, it is not a cost-effective or resource-management effective solution.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved power supply design.